Books by Bruce Wagner
Still Holding
by Bruce Wagner
Bruce Wagner has been hailed for his powerful prose, his Swiftian satire, and the scalpel-sharp wit that has, in each of his novels, dissected and sometimes disemboweled Hollywood excess.
In his most ambitious book to date, Still Holding, Wagner immerses readers in post-September 11 Hollywood, revealing as much rabid ambition, rampant narcissism, and unchecked mental illness as ever. He infiltrates the gilded life of a superstar actor/sex symbol/practicing Buddhist, the compromised world of a young actress whose big break comes when she's hired to play a corpse on Six Feet Under, and the strange parallel universe of look-alikes -- an entire industry in which struggling actors are hired out for parties and conventions to play their famous counterparts. Alternately hilarious and heartfelt, ferocious and empathetic, Still Holding is Bruce Wagner's most expertly calibrated work.
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Still Holding
by Bruce Wagner
In the wake of a fan attack and the events of September 11th, a handsome movie star and practicing Buddhist spends a year recuperating in the care of his ruthlessly opportunistic father.
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The Chrysanthemum Palace
by Bruce Wagner
The children of three entertainment industry icons, Bertie Krohn, Thad Michelet, and Clea Freemantle, known amongst themselves as the Three Musketeers, struggle in the shadows of their famous parents while unsuccessfully attempting to promote their own fledgling Hollywood careers. By the author of Still Holding. 50,000 first printing.
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I'm Losing You
by Bruce Wagner
A novel set in Hollywood brings together a offbeat crew that includes porn stars in love, scheming dermatologists, celebrity chore-whores, masseurs, traitorous shrinks, and sightless children, among others, in a glittering world of decadence. Reprint.
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Memorial: A Novel
by Bryan Washington, Bruce Wagner
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, O, the Oprah Magazine, Esquire, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Refinery29, Real Simple, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, and Lit Hub
“A masterpiece.” —NPR
“No other novel this year captures so gracefully the full palette of America.” —The Washington Post
“Wryly funny, gently devastating.” —Entertainment Weekly
A funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love.
Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years—good years—but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other.
But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.
Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end.
Copies
No copies available.
Memorial: A Novel
by Bryan Washington, Bruce Wagner
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, O, the Oprah Magazine, Esquire, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Refinery29, Real Simple, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, and Lit Hub
“A masterpiece.” —NPR
“No other novel this year captures so gracefully the full palette of America.” —The Washington Post
“Wryly funny, gently devastating.” —Entertainment Weekly
A funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love.
Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years—good years—but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other.
But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.
Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end.
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Memorial: A Novel
by Bryan Washington, Bruce Wagner
Joan Herlihy is a semi-successful architect grasping at the illustrious commission that will catapult her to international renown, glossy decor magazines, and the luxe condo designs of Meier, Koolhaas, and Hadid: the incestuous cult of contemporary Starchitects. Unexpectedly, she finds her Venice Beach firm on the short list for a coveted private memorial - a Napa billionaire's vanity tribute to relatives killed in the Christmas tsunami - with life-changing consequences. Her brother Chester clings to a failing career as a location scout before suffering an accidental injury resulting from an outrageous prank; the tragicomic repercussions lead him through a maze of addiction, delusion, paranoia ... and ultimately, transcendence.
Virtually abandoned by her family, the indomitable Marjorie Herlihy ... mother, widow, and dreamer falls prey to a confidence scheme dizzying in its sadism and complexity. And unbeknownst to Marj and her children, the father who disappeared decades ago is alive and well nearby, recently in the local news for reasons that will prove to be both his redemption and his undoing. Spiraling toward catastrophe, separate lives collide as family members make a valiant attempt to reunite and create an enduring legacy. To rewrite a ruined American dream.
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Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting
by James Ellroy, Bruce Wagner, Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz, Ulrich Wilmes
Transforming words into icons and images into wide-screen epics, Ed Ruscha has wholly reconceived the terms of painting for our era. Tagged variously as a Conceptualist, Pop artist or latter-day Surrealist, Ruscha flouts category, or rather incorporates all categories, always surprising and experimenting with both subject and method. His paintings are steeped in our times: cinema, advertising, logos, late capitalism and the twists and turns of postwar art have all informed his iconography since the early 1960s, arriving on the cool surfaces of his canvases with magnetic detachment. Ruscha eschews process and focuses exclusively on the final product: “the means to the end has always been secondary in my art,” he has said. Ruscha has also reinvented the use of words in art, finding disquieting ways to invest language with a weird, throbbing, ambient static, never aspiring to what he calls “word gestures,” since “each word is an excursion unto itself.” Fifty Years of Painting focuses on Ruscha's majestic oeuvre of paintings. A magnificent publication, it comes housed in a slipcase that sports the artist's classic painting “Standard Station” (1966), and, alongside fantastic reproductions, it contains a preface by novelist James Ellroy, essays by Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz and Ulrich Wilmes, a text by novelist Bruce Wagner, an interview with the artist by Kristine McKenna, an illustrated chronology and an exhibition history.
Ed Ruscha (born 1937) has made pioneering work in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, bookmaking, photography and film since 1958. Associated in the early 1960s with the Ferus Gallery, Ruscha was included in Walter Hopps' landmark Pop art show New Painting of Common Objects, at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962.
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The Empty Chair: Two Novellas
by Bruce Wagner
A profound and heart-wrenching work of spiritual storytelling from the internationally acclaimed author of Dead Stars
Celebrated for his “up-to-the-nanosecond insider’s knowledge of the L.A. scene” (The Washington Post), Bruce Wagner takes his storytelling in a radically new direction with two linked novellas. In First Guru, a gay Buddhist living in Big Sur achieves enlightenment in the horrific aftermath of his child’s suicide. In Second Guru, Queenie, an aging wild child, returns to India to complete the spiritual journey of her youth.
Told in ravaged, sensuous detail to a fictional Wagner by two strangers on opposite sides of the country, years apart from each other, these stories illuminate the random, chaotic nature of human suffering and the miraculous strength of the human spirit.
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Amputation A Novel
by Bruce Wagner
AMPUTATION is the first novel to be written about the inferno that obliterated two Los Angeles cities in January of 2025. Major characters are comedian Stephen Colbert; Karen Bass; a Timothée Chalamet stunt double; a fiercely pro-Palestinian heiress and her Zionist father; disgraced Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch and a failed indie film producer——along with an assorted battalion of ordinary people, opportunists, and looters.
A fable drenched in hyperrealism, AMPUTATION is a burnt jewel box showcasing Wagner's transcendent, scabrously poetic powers as he explores the lives (and deaths) of the fire victims, and the consequences of dereliction, delusion, incompetence——and impermanence.
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Force Majeure
by Bruce Wagner
Force Majeure was called a “smashing debut novel” by the Kirkus Reviews upon its original publication in 1991. A sardonic and absurdly dark, yet hilarious take on the “business as usual” of Hollywood’s twisted class system that proved Bruce Wagner was not just an author, but a cultural anthropologist.
The perpetually up-and-coming Hollywood screenwriter, Bud Wiggins, drifts aimlessly in and out of the lives of others and from one script idea to another. Moonlighting as a limo driver to pay his bills, he finds himself immersed in a world of vanity and degradation.
Wagner infuses his novel with the familiar archetypical characters of Hollywood—a nihilistic producer, an aging film star, an obnoxious mogul—and exposes the madness that drives them all.
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I Met Someone
by Bruce Wagner
In I Met Someone—what Wagner has called a “tenderly mutilated companion piece” to his screenplay for Maps to the Stars (the film directed by David Cronenberg for which Julianne Moore won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress)—Oscar–winning Dusty Wilding learns the unspeakable secret hidden beneath the glamour of her carefully calibrated celebrity lifestyle and marriage. With Sirkian grandeur and fearless precision, Wagner scales the heights of his own magnificent obsession: the merciless horrors of destiny—and the shock of courage that often allows human beings to embrace the sacred. I Met Someone has been called “among the most poetic and tragic of all [Wagner’s] work. And perhaps the most deliriously redemptive.”
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I'll Let You Go
by Bruce Wagner
Twelve-year-old Toulouse “Tull” Trotter lives with his grandfather on a vast Bel-Air parkland estate and spends most of his time with young cousins Lucy, “the girl detective,” and Edward, a prodigy who was born disfigured by the effects of Apert Syndrome. One day, an impulsive revelation by Lucy sets in motion a chain of events that changes Tull—and the Trotter family—forever.
I’ll Let You Go, the third novel of Bruce Wagner, is a Angelino Bleak House that follows a young boy as he searches for his lost father, his beautiful, drug-addicted mother, Katrina, who is still coming down from the disappearance of her husband, and their family’s connection to a street orphan and a homeless schizophrenic. A masterful, modern-day family saga about the valleys between wealth and poverty and reality and fantasy.
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The Marvel Universe Origin Stories : a Novel
by Bruce Wagner
THE MARVEL UNIVERSE: ORIGIN STORIES tracks the hallucinatory, transcendent, interconnected lives and deaths of an ensemble - an orphaned billionairess, a black man wrongly convicted of murder, a schizophrenic child obsessed with the comic book character Wolverine, a cancelled television showrunner, a hustler pretending to be the love child of Elon Musk, an aging standup comedienne - as they slouch toward 2020. For some of them, that pandemic year of tectonic social unrest will be their last; for others, a watershed allowing them to flourish in the new reality, one that surpasses any Hollywood tent-pole franchise's imaginings. It is truly the time of horror and chaos, yet of astonishing marvels...
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The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers Two Novellas
by Bruce Wagner
The sacred and the profane come together with visceral force in two novellas by Bruce Wagner, The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers.
The Met Gala follows a prominent family of influencers and would-be philanthropic socialites in the Hollywood hills as they spiral ever further away from reality. Candida is a young actress who sleeps with the “unhoused”—the ultimate charitable act—and her brother, Charlie, transitioned into womanhood at the age of eleven. Their mother and father have long been divorced but still come together to torment their children, mutilating and destroying friends and enemies along the way.
Tales of Saints and Seekers is the digestivo, a collection of stories about the journey to enlightenment and the wisdom given by gurus. Where The Met Gala pushes past boundaries and steps over the line, Tales of Saints and Seekers knows that there is no line at all, only characters who travel on their own path, sometimes straying and other times going completely off the map. Wagner is able to hold the dichotomy of the sacred and profane in one book, smearing them together, and ripping them apart. The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers is an illuminated manuscript of Heaven and Hell.
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ROAR American Master, The Oral Biography of Roger Orr
by Bruce Wagner
A new novel by Hollywood’s "master of satire."
The myth of an epic, public life—its triumphs and tragedies—is a particularly American obsession. ROAR is a metafictional exploration of such a life and attendant fame of an extraordinary, and completely made up, man.
Born in Nashville in 1940 and adopted by a wealthy San Francisco couple, Roger Orr—“Roar”—became an underground stand-up comedian with a cult following while still in his teens, segueing to an acclaimed songwriter in the Sixties. In the decades that followed, his talent spanned the worlds of entertainment, from film directing and books to fine art (paintings, sculpture). His promethean energies expanded to the world of medicine; he became a dermatologist, the first to patent cadaver skin for burn victims. A spiritual seeker who returned to India throughout his life, Roar was also a voracious lover of both men and women.
The journey of Roger Orr was a premonition of the cultural earthquakes to come. It wasn’t until his 40s that Roar learned his birth mother was black and it wasn't until his early 60s when he began the hormonal treatment and surgeries that chipped away at the armor covering what he always knew was his true identity: that of a woman.
Roar’s saga is best told by a cacophony of voices—family members, critics, historians, and the famous (Meryl Streep, Amanda Gorman, Dave Chappelle, Andy Warhol)—including some heard from the grave. In ROAR, Wagner brilliantly paints a vivid picture of one man, our times, and our culture's enduring obsession with fame.
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